New Biography a Boon for Sonia Gandhi

Authors who take on writing about India’s Nehru-Gandhi family do so at their own peril.

Members of India’s ruling Congress party, the political vehicle of the Nehru-Gandhis, have successfully derailed a number of projects they felt besmirched the family name and weakened the party that has ruled India for 51 years of its 64-year history as a nation state.

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Sonia Gandhi scattered rose petals over Mahatma Gandhi’s memorial at Rajghat, New Delhi on October 2.

The latest spate of Congress activism has focused on attacking works they deem harmful to the image of Sonia Gandhi, the Italian-born president of Congress and the nation’s most powerful politician.

Last year, Congress stalwarts complained that Spanish author Javier Moro’s “The Red Saree,” a fictionalized account of Ms. Gandhi’s life, was libelous in part due to one section where Ms. Gandhi considers quitting India to return to Italy. Roli Books, the New Delhi-based publisher, has demurred over bringing out an English translation of the book in the Indian market amid threats by Congress of legal action.

And a few years back, plans for a film of Ms. Gandhi’s life, starring Monica Bellucci, the Italian actress, were shelved after complaints from Congress apparatchiks that the script was to be based on an unauthorized biography by an Indian journalist.

The latest work to tackle Ms. Gandhi’s story, “Sonia Gandhi: An Extraordinary Life, An Indian Destiny,” which was publicly launched Monday by Palgrave Macmillan and will be available in India next week, is unlikely to face such challenges.

Rani Singh, a former BBC journalist, has written a favorable, at times cloying, account of Ms. Gandhi’s rise to power from unlikely beginnings that does little to challenge the notion in Congress circles that those bearing the Nehru-Gandhi name stand, like a royal family, above criticism.

Ms. Singh’s narrative is strongest when recounting Ms. Gandhi’s early life. Today, Ms. Gandhi is known as a sphinx-like politician who rarely shows her emotions and eschews the media. Ms. Singh ekes out a different portrait of a young Sonia studying with nuns in Italy and then at an English language school in Cambridge, where she meets Rajiv Gandhi, her future husband.

In one episode, Ms. Gandhi tips a plate of spaghetti over a drunk friend’s head after he added sodium glutamate to the dish as a prank. Ms. Gandhi is drawn as a beautiful “well turned out” individual who enjoyed socializing and was never short of money.

After marriage, the couple lived in New Delhi with Indira Gandhi, India’s prime minister and Rajiv’s mother. Ms. Gandhi won her mother-in-law’s trust by filling the role of homemaker, while Rajiv worked as a commercial airline pilot.

“The reliable, discreet, and reserved Sonia was just the kind of trustworthy tonic Indira needed to maintain her home front,” Ms. Singh writes.

The couple’s quiet life was shattered by the assassination of Indira Gandhi in 1984, which pushed Rajiv in to the political limelight. (His younger brother Sanjay, who Indira groomed as her political heir, had died a few years earlier in a plane crash.) After Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated in 1991, after one term as prime minister, Ms. Gandhi fended off requests from Congress leaders to head the party.

Ms. Singh did not get access to Ms. Gandhi for this book and much of the narrative feels like potted history. She does not drop any bombshells.

For readers new to India, though, Ms. Singh does a good job at providing historical context to key moments in Ms. Gandhi’s life, offering an easily digestible primer on India’s modern history.

She also convincingly shows how Ms. Gandhi evolves from a reticent to a consummate politician. After Rajiv’s death, she turns down the Congress presidency to focus on running a nongovernmental organization to promote her late husband’s interests: rural poverty, women’s emancipation and technology.

One participant remembers her saying about the organization: “My contribution is not that great…why don’t I leave it to the professionals?”

But Ms. Gandhi evolves in to a tactful, skilled administrator, and in 1998 finally accepts the Congress presidency. She faces a barrage of criticism from the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party for her foreign origins but weathers the storm, leading her party back to power in 2004 after eight years in opposition.

In the latter part of the book, Ms. Singh fails to grapple with the key question of why India today needs a political dynasty like the Nehru-Gandhi family, although she is clearly in favor of the party’s continued dominance.

She repeatedly says that “sycophants” in Congress want Ms. Gandhi at the party’s helm to win elections, such is the name recognition of the family. But she also portrays Ms. Gandhi as a successful politician who has pushed through laws to eradicate poverty and guarantee freedom of information.

Ms. Singh is too quick to praise Ms. Gandhi’s policies, including a work guarantee program which has cost the state billions of dollars with little public infrastructure to show for it.

At times, Ms. Singh seems to overly rely on gushing opinions of the pro-Congress chattering classes in New Delhi. At one point, a newspaper editor tells her that Ms. Gandhi, in refusing to become prime minister in 2004, had acted in the tradition of the Buddha, a prince who gave up his wealth to find enlightenment.

Her retention of the Congress reins, while appointing Manmohan Singh, a former finance minister with a reputation for probity, as prime minister, is described as a masterstroke.

Ms. Singh makes little, however, of the massive graft scandals that have implicated senior members of Congress in recent years, tainting the party’s reputation.

Despite saying the Congress party has “atrophied,” with local politicians relying lazily on the Nehru-Gandhi name to get elected, her suggested medicine seems to be more of the same.

Rahul Gandhi, Sonia’s son, and his cohort are “generation next” who reject the cult of personality in politics, she says. But nowhere does she discuss the fact that most young Indian lawmakers, like Mr. Gandhi, have inherited political roles from their families.

“Sonia is holding the torch high,” Ms. Singh writes in conclusion “waiting for the next generation of Gandhis to take it up.”

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